Let’s FEEEP: Flash, Epistolary, Essay, Ekphrasis, Persona: Use inventive strategies to write your life experience!
A lived life is full of observation and reflection; writing about it leads to new insights and discoveries for authors and their readers. This workshop will focus on strategies used by professional writers to cultivate creative nonfiction writing in a variety subgenres.

We’ll read and emulate flash fiction and flash nonfiction, personal essays, poems and prose in letter form and in persona voices and as responses to scenes. You’ll come away with a notebook full of new writing, new vocabulary on craft, and tools for revising pieces from class that you wish to refine. The instructor and your classmates will offer response to the work you create in class.

The instructor is an experienced developmental editor who can help you know how to move the piece toward its full manifestation. You’ll have fun finding a new dexterity with creative nonfiction.

Sheila will also be scheduling one-on-one consultations on Tuesday before her class.
To register for these consultations, please sign up here.

Sheila Bender founded WritingItReal.com in 2002 as a way of helping those who want to break their writing out into new forms, revise effectively, and generate more writing. Her many instructional books on writing, published by small presses as well as McGraw-Hill and Writer’s Digest Books, include Creative Writing DeMystified and Writing and Publishing the Personal Essay. A poetry collection, Behind Us the Way Grows Wider, a digital book entitled Sorrow’s Words: Writing Exercises to Heal Grief (available on Kindle and iTunes) and her memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, have garnered attentionfrom Seattle University where she is a 2013 distinguished guest lecturer, Providence Hospice of Seattle Foundation’s 2013 annual fund raising event,and other programs concerned with writing and spirituality. In Port Townsend where she lives, she teaches creative nonfiction and flash fiction classes for Centrum Foundation and The Writer’s Workshoppe, and hosts KPTZ’s radio program, “In Conversation with Sheila Bender: Discussions on Writing and the Writing Life.” Her responses to work in progress as well as her unique prompts and models for writers have helped hundreds of writers find the depth in their writing and have editors accept the writing for publication.